Mink River [B1688]

2010 PB in nice clean condition. Like Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people. In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery and hilarity, bears and tears, brawls and boats, a garrulous logger and a silent doctor, rain and pain, Irish immigrants and Salish stories, mud and laughter. There's a Department of Public Works that gives haircuts and counts insects, a policeman addicted to Puccini, a philosophizing crow, beer and berries. An expedition is mounted, a crime committed, and there's an unbelievably huge picnic on the football field. Babies are born. A car is cut in half with a saw. A river confesses what it's thinking. . . It's the tale of a town, written in a distinct and lyrical voice, and readers will close the book more than a little sad to leave the village of Neawanaka, on the wet coast of Oregon, beneath the hills that used to boast the biggest trees in the history of the world.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Absolutely stunning book. Doyle expresses feelings that I've never seen put in words before. He portrays human connection beautifully and his writing is pure poetry."; "Amazing storytelling and character development, I love the overall storyline and how all the many characters are all so intertwined. Each character has their own plots and being able to follow all of these different stories is a joy!"; "Magical realism at its finest, truly. Haven't felt this transported and delighted by a piece of fiction in years. Gifted to me by a friend as I was leaving the pacific northwest, with the intention of providing me a literary portal through which I can return to the land anytime I want. I don't have any PNW specific fiction to compare it against, but I can't imagine a more effective mode of transportation to that lush, green, inexplicable piece of earth than this story."